Thursday, 20 October 2016

I was in my sisters place, attending to
appa and trying to keep amma from fretting when Bull sent me a text. “Just
heard that Bob Dylan won the Nobel for literature. For once someone whose works
I am rather acquainted with”. At first I thought it was just one of those
hoaxes that sweep the internet from time to time, but this time, with everybody
from the Guardian to the NYT weighing in, it obviously wasn’t.

There was a time when I had what was
arguably the best room in college. 296, Ram Bhavan was the last room in the
“new wing facing sky”, overlooking the Birla Museum and its mucky pond where
fat koi fish, mottled silver and orange swam in its murky depths. In front of
me were the lawns, the grass trimmed and the hedges manicured. And from the
balcony seat, you could see the most spectacular sunsets over the arid hardpan
that lay beyond the campus walls.

One evening, there was a storm. Have you
seen it rain in the desert? It’s spectacular. It went on for a long while,
shading dusk into night, and angry streaks of lightning would shatter the
darkness. I sat there in my armchair, in
the dim yellow of a 60 watt corridor lightbulb, while Desolation Row played in
my room. I was wrapped in the warm cocoon of a bottle of phens. I had my packet
of Charms cigarettes, and I had a brilliant light-and-dark show. And in that
setting, I’d see the parade of grotesqueries in the song. Cinderella, her hands
in her back pockets “Bette Davis style”, Ophelia, an old maid at 27, sepia
tinted postcards of hanged men, a hand painting passports brown. Einstein in
green rags, playing a violin. A leather cup on a back alley quack’s desk, where
a nurse snaps on rubber gloves before she shuffles a pack of dog-eared cards,
all saying the same thing. A song that
was both a heap of broken images, as well as scraps of moving pictures of
broken people. Even now, if I close my eyes and think back, I can see them all,
like something seen through a grimy window, a group of famous marionettes going through the same set of motions for eternity.

There must have been a lot of division
about awarding Dylan the Nobel – I’m pretty certain I saw a lot of headlines
about how it was deserved or undeserved, often running side by side. I didn’t
read any of them. Also since I quit Facebook, I don’t know what my friends are
saying – or which clips of which songs were posted.

My own feelings are mixed. There’s the
world of Nobel Laureates. And there’s the world of Bob Dylan. Separate worlds
until now. The former, at least to me, was essentially a conservative
institution, with the standards and choices of a group of Harold Bloom clones.
Dylan – the quintessential Dylan, the Dylan of those 640 days between Another Side of Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde - was the opposite of
that world. But that’s a thought that doesn’t stand up to closer examination.
What was revolutionary for the US in the 60s – or in India in the 80s is dated
and archaic to a world that’s grown up with touchstones like Kurt Cobain and
Tupac Shakur. For someone who was born in the 1990s, how is Dylan different
from Paul Anka or Jim Reeves or any one of those dinosaurs of “Western music”?

For some of us, the answer is, well,
obviously, if you’ve listened to
Dylan, the difference is obvious. But listening to Dylan isn’t the same for the
iTunes playlist era. Of course you can line up Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume
X on your iPhone and listen to everything from Like a Rolling Stone to When
the Deal Goes Down or the latest thing from Dylan does Sinatra, but that’s
hardly the same thing as that segue from Ballad
in Plain D to It Ain’t Me, Babe
in Another Side of Bob Dylan or that
amazing B-side of Bringing it All Back
Home (Mr Tambourine Man, Gates of
Eden, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue). And when you listen to it when you
still are struggling to figure out who the fuck you are and what the fuck
you’re doing in this fucked up world, it leaves an impression.

A large part of listening to old music is nostalgia,
of course. With songs of love and songs of youth, it’s pretty much a guaranteed
return trip. But not so with Dylan. A large part of it is the timelessness of
it. It’s alright ma remains as
scathing a commentaryin 2016 as it
did in 1964. When the ship comes in may
have been written as a response to a snooty hotel clerk, but works so well as a
prayer of hope and defeat of adversity as well as “Fuck you, naysayers”
comment.

If that two year period was the kind of
thing that any artiste would kill for, just remember that Blood on the Tracks
came almost a decade later. And if later albums weren’t always great, remember
that Shot of Love had Every Grain of Sand, Oh Mercy had Shooting Star, Time out of
Mind had Not Dark Yet, Love and Theft had Mississippi and – well - all of Love and Theft.

So now, I’ve seen enough people (internet
commenters, so take that as you will) diss Dylan. “Can’t sing”. “Overrated”. “Sexist/Misogynist”.
“White male”. And yes. He sang for Miss Universe contests and shilled for
Victoria’s Secret underwear. But he also came out on stage to accept his
Grammy, twitching and fidgeting, and said “My dad, he was a very simple man and
he didn’t leave me a lot. But what he told me was….” (A very long pause as Dylan looks at the award, the way a tramp may
examine something shiny found in the garbage, wondering how much he could hock
it for).. “He said son…”. Pause again. “He said so many things”. And he
followed it up with a raging Masters of
War, while the first Gulf War (the “good” Gulf war) raged on in Iraq and
Kuwait. He’d make speeches about the plight of American farmers during Live Aid,
completely pissing off Bob Geldof.

He just didn’t give a shit.

Then, there’s Ballad of a Thin Man. It’s a
song I hate. It may have been written about a specific person in a specific set
of circumstances, but I’ve always felt it was about me, that I was Mr Jones –
that something was happening around me, but I didn’t know what, despite my wide
reading, that despite trying so hard, I still didn’t understand.

And when a song can make you feel
uncomfortable in your own skin, it means that the songs words have power.